MY WEBSITE

SEE MY PHOTOS

These photographs are just a few I have taken over the last ten years at The Albany Bulb, also known as the Landfill, the Waterfront and just The Bulb. It is a place I feel passionate about. That much is obvious.
There are many of us who believe that this piece of the much hyped Eastshore State Park should have been left untouched and unmanaged - because it is a unique example of what happens when a place naturally and organically self regulates. But the dogma of 'preservation' and 'conservation areas' 'resource protection', 'habitats' and 'liability' overrules all individual identity. They cannot leave anything untouched, un-designed. It is as if if they (the park planners) didn't make it, it has no value.
Rules, guidelines, regulations, interpretive signage, fences, safety, sanctioned art - it leaves nothing to the imagination. That is what the landfill meant to us - a place of unlimited imagination.

March 07, 2010

my mothers birthday

Mum and Judy, Kuala Lumpur, 1960

Yesterday. 6th March 1928. She would have been 82. She didn't make it past 62. She died in August of 1990 and I have to admit that I neither remember that date nor did I remember her birthday yesterday. My older brother had to remind me. That isn't to say I don't remember her. Oh yeah, I remember Charmian.

She had the most extraordinarily long and narrow fingers, chiseled. Yet her left hand could not grip anything - except for some reason the ubiquitous Consulate cigarette - she explained it was a consequence of being damaged by forceps during her birth, and her entire left side was weaker, she often stumbled to the side (though of course alcoholics do stumble). She also, her entire life, suffered from a weak bladder, needing to dash into buildings at a moments notice to use the facilities, as she called them. She would cry sometimes, gripping her knees, rocking back and forth on the toilet seat as she released a pent up torrent which she had almost not been able to hold. Her mouth, a usually flirtatious crooked smile, tensed into a line of anguish at these times. And she would emerge from the 'Ladies' with a furrowed brow, the cigarette and handbag gripped tight and compose herself.

But her long and narrow fingers were beautiful and left the most distinct shape on my face, a slicing slap which stung fiercely and without much warning. They were strong and powerful hands in spite of her disability and I watched them a lot. They fascinated me. She cooked, and baked - surprisingly well, she dressed gracefully when she still held out hope of a life of some elegance. The Lake Club in Kuala Lumpur, the cocktail parties and finger foods, the gin flowing like water and the flirtations with men who are completely obscure in my mind but which led, according to her diary, to a desperate love affair with a man my father had brought to our home.

My mother fiercely defended me against all assaults, but at some point abandoned my protection to fight other battles - her own fear of aging alone, of not being attractive to the men she met through 'The Lady' magazine, the loss of her own mother who she depended on while at the same time spitting out defiance, the fury at my dad over the cost of a needed pair of shoes for me during their raging ugly divorce, my younger brother being described as needing the discipline of a military school and during which I was shipped to the hinterland of the Surrey hills to a Church of England former missionary boarding school where I proceeded to unravel for the first time in my short life. I always assumed my older brother - cool, aloof and distant - had avoided the worst of it, and it shocked me when he told me much much later that his own banishment to a boarding school had threatened his own internal safety in a way I could never have imagined.

I absolutely adored my mum, adopted her dislikes including that of my dad, for a long time. I loved that she always had animals in her life - dogs, cats, which she seemed to hold a great affection for. Yet, when moving day came - and it came often - she seemed entirely unperturbed at their being left behind. When I first took in abandoned kittens - in my 20's in a London squat, I was terrified that I would not be able to take care of them.

My Mum, born Elizabeth, but re-invented as Charmian, was complicated. Let me just leave it at that. Like most women. That much I know. Even if I don't understand much else.

Comments

Jill, reading your memories of your mother stirred me this Sunday morning. Perhaps it is common for women to have these strong remembrance of details like their mothers hands (my mother's had large knuckles and strong nails) or the unique rhythm of her feet as she walked along in her high heels. I think we daughters are so tied to our mothers all our lives, and those complicated women leave complicated wounds.

My own mother died in 1982, when she was 59, after 3 years of cancer and multiple surgeries and their complications ravaging her body. A woman who had once been the strongest most independent role model I could have imagined while growing up, had become small, frail and dependent on others, though she remained feisty to the end.